Christoph Willibald Gluck - Ballet Suite - b. Orfeo

Gluck Ballet Suite no. 1
The Ballet Suite No. 1 includes selections from three of Gluck's greatest stage works. It begins with an Air Gai and Lento from Iphigenia in Aulis. Familiar music, taken from Gluck’s most frequently performed and famous opera Orfeo ed Euridice, follows the initial movement. This well-known music is arranged in a three-part form in which the graceful Dance of the Blessed Spirits, coupled with the eternally beautiful interlude for solo flute, one of the most poignant and memorable of all of Gluck’s melodies, becomes the centerpiece of the suite. The suite concludes with two excerpts from the opera Armide, a Musette and a Sicilienne.

Christoph Willibald Gluck was an opera composer of the early classical period. After many years at the Habsburg court at Vienna, Gluck brought about the practical reform of opera's dramaturgical practices that many intellectuals had been campaigning for over the years. With a series of radical new works in the 1760s, among them Orfeo ed Euridice and Alceste, he broke the stranglehold that Metastasian opera seria had enjoyed for much of the century.